Baking makes times Bright

By Addie Broyles, American-Statesman

Reprinted with permission.

(Editor’s note: Sharon Bright is a 1988 graduate of Clarendon High School. H.R. Bright was a longtime resident of Howardwick.)

When Sharon Bright’s dad was in the hospital during the last few months of his life, she felt helpless.

It was 2010, and he was living near Amarillo while she was here [in Austin], working as a server at what was then Castle Hill.

As H.R. Bright’s esophageal cancer worsened, he moved into a standalone hospice care facility, and Sharon Bright drove up there to gather with her family and be by his side.

She was amazed at the ability of the nurses to immediately connect with both the patients, making their end-of-life care more comfortable, and the family members, who aren’t sure how to handle a situation involving medical and emotional needs that many of them hadn’t experienced.

“All you can do is sit there, but the nurses were so in tune. I don’t know how they are like that all the time. They are cheerleaders all day, every day,” she says. “They bathed him, shaved him and helped him feel relaxed and happy.”

The nurses and chaplains became part of their family team, and everybody played a role in supporting one another during this difficult time.

“People don’t get (hospice care) until they are in it,” Bright says. The friend she was staying with baked cookies and brought them to share. “Everybody bonded over food. It was the communal thing.”

They spent about a week in hospice, saying their goodbyes and, in an important part of the process, also celebrating his life – he and Sharon’s mom were married for 52 years – and their last days together.

Her dad died on Easter Sunday.

She returned to Austin, her heart forever changed by the experience.

Later that year, after a stint at the Steeping Room, Bright found herself at an Uchi hiring event, where she brought salty oatmeal cookies to help woo the managers.

Her infectious personality stood out among the applicants, and Bright was picked to help open Uchiko, where she is one of those affable servers who stick with you long after you’ve forgotten what you ordered.

As she settled back into life in Austin, Bright was still grieving her dad’s death.

“I felt like I really needed to do something, but I wasn’t ready to go in and sit with someone in hospice,” she says. “So I called hospice here and asked ‘What can I do?’ Nancy (McCranie, director of volunteer and bereavement services,) said, ‘Well, what do you do?’ I told her I can garden, upholster and bake.”

Why don’t you make some cookies, McCranie suggested.

What started as an impromptu act of altruism in early 2011 quickly turned into a weekly (and sometimes twice-a-week) affair.

Every Tuesday morning, Bright fires up her oven to bake something sweet for the staff, volunteers and patients at Hospice Austin’s Christopher House and Hospice Austin-Williamson County in Georgetown.

“It touches them because it’s homemade and heartfelt and linked to her own personal story,” McCranie says. “Not everybody knows Sharon’s story of why she does it, but know they do know that it’s a love offering. It reminds us all that we belong to each other one way or another.”

Bright likes to try new cookie recipes, but after three years of baking them for people who have become her friends, they will often request their favorites.

Most often, “it’s four dozen of whatever I’m feeling that day,” Bright says. No matter what recipe she pulls out, it’s the ritual of baking every Tuesday morning that has had the most impact on her life.

“I love the consistency of baking,” she says. “It teaches me precision, patience and helps make me feel happy. How can you feel sad when somebody gets so excited about eating a cookie?”

Bright’s spirit of giving doesn’t stop with the cookies. She is behind nearly all of the charitable efforts at the restaurants, from benefit dinners for a server involved in a motorcycle accident to a cakewalk fundraiser for another server who had a back injury.

In 2013, her fellow Uchiko staffers decided it was time to return the favor.

“My oven was dying and they said, ‘We are going to raise money and get you an oven.’”

She forgot about the proposal, but six months later, at their staff retreat and just two weeks after her workhorse of an oven had finally petered out, they handed her a gift card for $2,000 to buy a new one.

“I was just sobbing.”

Last week, Bright baked Martha Stewart’s white chocolate gingerbread blondies in that spiffy oven and then delivered them – still warm – to Christopher House, Hospice Austin’s 15-room facility in East Austin, where she was greeted by staff whom she’d just seen earlier in the week.

One of them reminded her that she had a stack of Tupperware in the kitchen to take home.

Bright had designated 2014 as the “Year of Generosity” (or YOG, for short), but anyone who knows her knows that 2015 won’t be any different, so she’d better remember to pick them up.